Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

—

LINA REMEMBERS WHEN PIGS were forbidden in the streets of Hanover. Now oxen and cows are also not allowed. Yet she crosses the street between her new house and their old family courtyard fearfully, for such an undertaking is more dangerous than it once was. There are so many carts and carriages.

Now there are some days when Betty comes and Lina cannot rise from bed.

She wants only to sleep.

She remembers the ringing of the bells, the muffle of snowfall in winter, the calls of children skating on the Stadtgraben. She remembers the nightwomen who came to collect the waste. She remembers the beadle, summoned to move along beggars who lingered. She remembers her mother, the smells of making soap and candles for the household. She remembers her mother’s angry face, the hard bump of her pregnant belly, remembers her hands, pushing Lina away.

Don’t do that.

One day she wakes and dresses and feels full of a worried, inchoate urgency. Betty hurries to bring tea and soup, and Lina gets up and dresses and walks down through the orchard to the river and stamps her stick into the ground and feels a bleak rage at a childhood so unhappy.

But it does not last.

Gentleness comes upon her almost as quickly, William’s hand brushing her cheek as he took his farewell that night during her blindness.

The surprise of it. This, this. Here it is, after all. She can choose what to remember. Summon it. She closes her eyes in relief, this gentleness to replace the old hurt. It is what she has been waiting for. She had not known she could ask for it.

That night she lies on her side, knees drawn up as she had done as a child, and thinks of William holding up his arms to her when he had helped her to sit on the branch of an apple tree.

She is lifted to his shoulders, and he carries her away into the moonlight by the river.

Her father holds her against his chest, her ear to his heartbeat, his hand stroking her hair.

There is the scent of Silva, her forehead pressed to his soft back at night in bed.

Then she is standing on the roof of the old laundry in Slough, and a fox barks across the frozen meadow. The moon is full above her head. The stars carve fantastic shapes into the darkness.

Worlds within worlds are in all things.

—

ONE EVENING IN DECEMBER, the black-haired child finds Lina seated on the bench swept clear of snow in the courtyard after nightfall.

The night is very cold, and the old woman is breathing hard, and her eyes are wide with distress. Both hands are clenched on her stick.

“Did you see that man just now?” she asks the child. She shrinks down on the bench and makes a face, eyes like slits under her frilled white cap. “A little dark-faced man? I was sure I saw a man go into the stable.”

“No one’s there, missus,” the child says. “I was just in there. Only the old horse, Jango, is there. You know him.”

“I had a bad brother,” the old woman says. “Someone told me that he was found strangled in the cemetery.”

The child’s eyes widen. “We heard about that,” she says.

The old woman shakes her head.

The child holds out her hand. “Do you want to go home, missus?”

The old lady looks around. “Where are the others?” she says.

“I don’t know,” the child says. “What others?”

The old woman looks up at her. Then her eyes move past the child’s face to the sky.

“Do you know the stars?” the woman says. She points with her stick, traces shapes: horse and fish, swan and dragon.

Then she falls quiet.

The child sits down beside her.

“Your mother is kind to you?” the old lady asks.

“I love my mother,” the child says. Ich liebe meine Mutter.

The lady nods. “That’s good.

“I had another brother, my brother William,” she adds after a time. “We used to sit here on this very bench, and he would show me the stars. I loved him very much.”

The child is quiet, looking up at the sky.

After a while the old lady stands up. “Now I’m ready,” she says, and holds out her hand. The child takes it and sees her across the street.

At the door, the old lady leans down. “Give me a kiss.”

The child obliges.

“Thank you, my dear,” the old lady says.

—

SHE LIES IN HER BED that night, breathing hard. Betty the servant and various Herschel relatives gather round. Fans are supplied. Tea is brought.

“I’m sleepy,” someone says.

“Hush,” says someone else.

At midnight, Lina turns her head at an odd angle on the pillow, as if trying to see something.

“It’s the moon,” someone says. “The moon at the window.”

Someone else says, “Let her see it.”

Hands are beneath her, turning her, until her face is full of moonlight.

“Look. She’s calmer now,” someone says.

Lina does not leave her house again.

—

IT IS JANUARY. Snow lies deep and undisturbed in the fields and weighs down the boughs of the fir trees in the forest. Fresh snow falls now on the procession as it moves through the streets, the cold mourners gathering their cloaks about them. The churchyard has been kept warm by fires, and the ground is muddy. Above the shimmering radiance of their heat, a few snowflakes whirl.

The retinue that follows Lina’s body to the churchyard of the Gartengemeinde includes the royal carriages. Garlands of laurel and cypress and palm branches, sent by the Crown Princess from Herrenhausen, adorn the coffin. The service is held in the same garrison church where Lina was christened and confirmed nearly a century earlier.

The slab has been carved with an inscription supplied by her servant, Betty, who reported that her mistress had made a draft of the words, her exact age, of course, left blank.

The gaze of her who has passed to glory was, while below, turned to the starry Heaven; her own Discoveries of Comets and her share in the immortal labours of her brother, William Herschel, bear witness of this to later ages. The Royal Irish Academy of Dublin and the Royal Astronomical Society in London numbered her among their members. At the age of ninety-seven years 10 months she fell asleep in happy peace, and in full possession of her faculties; following to a better life her father, Isaac Herschel, who lived to the age of sixty years two months seventeen days and lies buried near this spot since the 25th March, 1767.

With her in the grave, according to her instructions, is the old almanac that had been William’s. Her head rests on a pillow of lavender brought from Lisbon.

—

BY NIGHTFALL, the snow has stopped.

The skies have cleared, revealing the magnificent Pleiades high in the sky. Gemini and Orion appear in the east. The great king, blazing Jupiter, accompanied by its attendant moons, slowly makes its magnificent march across the heavens among legions of stars.

The black-haired child across the street had followed the impressive retinue through the streets to the churchyard earlier in the day, but she’d felt afraid of the group of mourners and the coffin, and sad about the old lady, and she’d gone home.

That night she lies in her bed and looks out the window.

She thinks of the old lady sitting on the bench in their courtyard, pointing out the constellations with her stick.

“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” the old lady had said.

“No, I’m not,” the child had said.

“That’s good,” the old lady had said.

The child had leaned against her. In truth, she was afraid of the dark.

“You understand that the stars are always here,” the old lady said. “They do not go away in the day. It is that we can see them only in the dark. That is the good thing about the dark.”